As they stirred, some uncomfortably, some with irritation, he smiled a little, knowing that he had them to handle as he wanted. “Not that ye need ever be ashamed of the building itself. Your great-grandfathers put it up – God only knows how they did it, two years after the Famine. It must have been a change from hearing Mass in a smoky kitchen or around a slab of rock in a corner of a field. No, they didn’t do a bad job, even if it is a bit damp and has the door on the windy side. I’m just wondering whether ye would have put up anything at all.” He was really harrying them now. “Oh, yes, ye milk yer cows and fill yer churns, ye have yer breakfast, the bowl of porridge, the eggs and bread and butter, maybe the rasher and black pudding. Ye get yer Sunday papers and see that the Russians or maybe the Yanks have sent another rocket to the moon. What do ye want a church at all for?”

They were quite still, staring up at him with real interest. Go on, man, he told himself, you’re doing fine. But what was he to go on about? Christ, he thought, I’m back where I started. Only now, I’ve brought in churns of milk, rockets to the moon. “All these things don’t matter,” he went on; “we have them, whether we believe or not. But each one of us has the choice of something more. No one can choose for us, and all we have to go on” – he lifted his arms to emphasize it, and the pain made him gasp – “is that Christ said, ‘If any man keep My word, he shall not see death forever.’” And with arms still painfully extended, he turned around to grope for the altar.

The movement took them by surprise. They stayed sitting as he drew the chasuble with trembling hands up over his head; then he heard the hurried rumble as they stood up for the Creed. They moved into it as if in relief, taking over from him even as he began the first verse.

“I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things, visible and invisible...”

How had he slipped up? Not even in his first sermon had he made such a hames of it. As he freewheeled through the prayer, his voice drowned by the crowd’s confident singsong, he tried to think of what he should have said – “Everyone that is of the truth, heareth my voice”? No, not quite, but there were dozens of texts that he should have called on; not called on – they should have come to him unbidden, as they had once come. What was wrong? Why could he not lift his right arm?